I cannot say, however, but that I was for some time amused with my
uncle's peculiarities. Even the very desolateness of the establishment
had something in it that hit my fancy. When the weather was fine I used
to amuse myself, in a solitary way, by rambling about the park, and
coursing like a colt across its lawns. The hares and pheasants seemed
to stare with surprise, to see a human being walking these forbidden
grounds by day-light. Sometimes I amused myself by jerking stones, or
shooting at birds with a bow and arrows; for to have used a gun would
have been treason. Now and then my path was crossed by a little
red-headed, ragged-tailed urchin, the son of the woman at the lodge,
who ran wild about the premises. I tried to draw him into familiarity,
and to make a companion of him; but he seemed to have imbibed the
strange, unsocial character of every thing around him; and always kept
aloof; so I considered him as another Orson, and amused myself with
shooting at him with my bow and arrows, and he would hold up his
breeches with one hand, and scamper away like a deer.
There was something in all this loneliness and wildness strangely
pleasing to me. The great stables, empty and weather-broken, with the
names of favorite horses over the vacant stalls; the windows bricked
and boarded up; the broken roofs, garrisoned by rooks and jackdaws; all
had a singularly forlorn appearance: one would have concluded the house
to be totally uninhabited, were it not for a little thread of blue
smoke, which now and then curled up like a corkscrew, from the centre
of one of the wide chimneys, when my uncle's starveling meal was
cooking.
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